I recently had an issue figuring out how to get picom start while booting into Awesomewm. After doing much research I found that I should be able to handle this with the initialization files for Xorg. All the files that are involved in setting up your X session are simply shell scripts. This means that I can just run commands from them like I normally would.

Anyway, here's the solution to getting picom running on login. Not much here, but it works.

.xsession

#!/bin/sh

# Make sure this is before the 'exec' command or it won't be sourced.
[ -f /etc/xprofile ] && . /etc/xprofile
[ -f ~/.xprofile ] && . ~/.xprofile

exec awesome

.xprofile

#!/bin/sh


# turn the bell off -- annoying
xset -b b off

# start picom
picom -b